


Lost Pages

by Echovous



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Diary/Journal, Gen, POV First Person, Pre-Canon, Shady Organizations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21946516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Echovous/pseuds/Echovous
Summary: The coding engineers can say all they want that Rasputin is their baby, but I know for a fact I’m the one raising him from the ground up.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. DIARY ENTRY 6/10

Exactly two sols ago, I had a press conference to return to on Earth. I don’t remember what it was about, I doubt it was really important. Point is, I didn’t tell Rasputin at the time because I didn’t think I needed to. That was a huge mistake. While I was gone, things went haywire. 

According to everyone on site, Rasputin immediately began to close himself off. He refused to respond to any worker and he began to alter shipping orders to the facility. Ammunition. Warsats. Rasputin was trying to load his weapons...

Luckily the coding engineers were able to force him into a reboot before he fired anything off and the site was mostly evacuated. 

In the future, Rasputin will be too complex to just shut off. That’s... Concerning. But it will be fine. He’s not violent or evil. He works on complex logic coding, and I know from Rasputin himself that he didn’t intend to hurt anyone. 

I requested to be there when Rasputin awoke from reboot, and my request was granted. 

“You scared everyone in Clovis Bray,” I told him. “The place was evacuated. Did I ever teach you what the word ‘evacuate’ means?”

“Evacuate: the removal of something or someone from danger to a place of safety.” 

I smiled. “Yes. That’s correct. But do you understand why they would do that?” 

19 seconds of silence.

“Your data signature disappeared from my radar,” Rasputin answered, in those words, and it all clicked.

The only one who didn’t know I was going to that press conference was Rasputin. No one would have thought to tell him, I sure as hell wouldn’t. 

His presumably violent response had been one of fear. He thought something bad had happened to me and he must have freaked out. This was a good thing. Very good. His response just needs a bit of tweaking and it could be useful. Imagine if he was this attached to, I don’t know, the Earth, the military base on Luna, or even the human race as a whole. This is a response that can be used... But I’m getting off track. 

I apologized to Rasputin, even though it felt a little strange to be apologizing to a machine. This will be good for him though. If he learns what empathy is then he can utilize it himself in the future. So I told Rasputin the proper response to someone who says they’re sorry.

“Apology accepted.”

“Good,” I smiled. It was really hard not to. “Would you like to know when I leave Mars from now on?” 

He told me that he would, so that’s the plan from now on. I made an electronic copy of my schedule and gifted it to Rasputin. Now he knows exactly where I’ll be at any time... That’s... Kind of creepy to type out, but it’s nothing like that! It’s so interesting to see how he processes things now. He’ll actually wait to tell me things which, again... feels really wrong to type out, but it’s not! He’s thinking, really thinking, and with each thought he’s getting less and less artificial. 

Unfortunately, not everyone thinks this is as cool as I do.

“This is a disaster waiting to happen!” Dad, Clovis Bray II himself, snapped from where he paced. “If he were to fire on the Earth...” he left it unsaid.

“I told you that I talked with him,” I said. “He was afraid, Dad. He responded in the only way his systems could: violently.”

“And who taught ‘him’ that?” An accusation directed at me.

“No one. To him it’s not even a violent response. He’s connected to the weapons. They’re tools to him.”

Dad sighed. “A fearful response isn’t the answer the press is looking for. Fear is erratic, fear is random. If we tell them that Rasputin is fearful, then they will want to shut him down.”

I nodded. “They will, but we don’t have to tell him that... Let’s say that yesterday was planned out. We were teaching Rasputin new behaviors.”

Dad just looked at me. “You’re telling the press that. They can’t know the truth. For all our sakes.”


	2. DIARY ENTRY 7/10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of a shorter chapter,
> 
> Enjoy!

I’ll admit it. I was wrong. 

Rasputin’s fearful responses don’t have the potential greatness I initially thought they would have. Fear makes him unpredictable — like any human being, I’d argue, but the higher ups don’t want to hear arguing. In fact, they’ve been pretty solid on what they want to hear: limitation. 

It’s the opposite of what we want and have been giving Rasputin for the past few years, but right now, it’s all we can do. 

They don’t understand Rasputin like any of us. All they see is a weapon storing weapons. They don’t understand that to Rasputin the weapons we have him store is a part of him. He doesn’t understand the concept of war or violence yet. To him, he’s just getting a gift.

That’s all it is, but it only takes one misfire to shut him down for good. So we’re being careful. 

He no longer has access to the shipping floor where the crates are loaded. A sol ago, he could automatically move any crate from the warehouse and load it into storage according to the crate number. Now, all storage is manual, and if the conversation I overheard is to be trusted, we’re losing a lot of money for this. 

It’s not my problem, though. I’m only here to teach Rasputin to communicate, not to manage the hundreds of employees who just got their jobs back, so I’m going to continue working with Rasputin. 

Just last sol, I was having another session with him. We just talked about the warehouse and I was listening to his answers.

The question was about storage.

“I was able to do that.” Rasputin said. His words came out monotonously but the connotation was solemn. 

What do I tell him? Yeah, you used to be able to do that but now the inhibitors prevent you from processing it... 

That is what I have to tell him, but it doesn’t make it easy. Like I’ve said before, Rasputin, although a highly advanced super computer, is still just a kid when it comes to speech. He doesn’t know how to vocalize how he “feels,” (oh, the engineers just hate it when I use the f word, but I’m going to use it). 

When Rasputin thinks, there are hundreds of complex calculations running through his systems followed by a trillion checkpoints to ensure there are no mistakes in the original message. Part of those very equations were altered to limit his abilities. 

It must piss him off. It pisses me off.


	3. DIARY ENTRY 8/10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Artificial Superintelligence

We're launching more satellites above Mars' surface. There's a total of sixty-four now.

Rasputin, as per usual, doesn't have control of them. I'm hoping to change that, but it will take some extra work. Right now, everyone's just afraid of him and it's all because of some virtual tour.

Apparently, the Arabic version of the tour had a mistranslation and compared Rasputin to an artificial god. Obviously, this was not in the original Russian and English scripts, but once the conspiracy theorists got a hold of it, it didn't matter anymore. Now, all that mattered was how Clovis Bray is hiding something from the world. 

So, I decided to go on a little tour of my own. I started in Africa, touring from Morocco to Egypt, then India, China, and Australia, before moving on to Russia and the rest of Europe. (Rasputin knew all about my plans, by the way, and he approved of them.) However, my last location to tour was going to be the Americas, but my father pulled the tour the moment he realized what I was doing. Despite how I was trying to increase understanding of our operation, he was not happy. 

In fact, he immediately sat me down the moment I got off the shuttle. This is what I remember:

"Do you know the three categories of AI?"

I didn't answer.

"Narrow intelligence, general intelligence, and artificial superintelligence," he continued. "Rasputin is the only AI to reach general intelligence, and still, our computer scientists argue with that classification... Do you know what 'general intelligence' means?"

"He's on par with any other human," I answered, putting emphasis on the word 'other.'

"Yes and no," my father's lip twitched in the way it always does. "Rasputin doesn't simply perform tasks. He solves problems. He adapts to obstacles and applies what he learns to different situations," He paused. "What if he decided that humanity was an obstacle he needed to overcome?"

"That's ridiculous" I snapped. "Rasputin was designed with humanity's best interest in mind. He wouldn't destroy humanity to protect humanity."

"But he could," my father said. "AGI, according to the theories, can evolve into artificial superintelligence. Rasputin most certainly will if we're not careful, and if he does, he will become completely self-aware."

This is when I froze, holding my tongue. Wasn't that the goal? To make Rasputin self-aware? If it wasn't then why was I talking with him every day? Why was I recording his responses? 

To teach him language, obviously... But doesn't his understanding of language prove self-awareness? I knew that wasn't necessarily the case, but just a few months ago, I had asked him about how he felt losing control of his storage systems and he'd answered it. He had recognized what he'd been able to do and what he now couldn't do. Surely that was self-aware. He'd answered a question about himself...

...Did I make him self-aware with my question? 

When I zoned back in, my father was still talking. "What happens if he deems self-preservation more important than humanity when he has the weapons to destroy us. What happens then?"

I honestly didn't know the answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trials has nothing to do with this fic, but I just have to say that I'm so happy it's coming back to Destiny 2.


End file.
